I stayed up late last night to watch Niteline with Ted Koppel. He was doing a piece on the documentary Stolen Childhoods (www.stolenchildhoods.org), about international child labor. Child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa is what first piqued my interest in fair trade chocolate (www.divinechocolate.com) . So I was happy to see that one of the abuses highlighted was that of child coffee pickers in East Africa. The kids’ families can’t afford to send them to school, and the kids are earning a pittance for picking these coffee berries. Children are preferred over adults for this work because they can climb into the trees and get at more berries, but they often get scraped and cut doing this. They’re exposed to lots of pesticides in the process.

As they pointed out in the documentary, buying fair trade/organic coffee is one way to fight this abuse. Fair trade beans are bought from cooperatives that pay workers a decent wage, support community development, and ensure against child labor. (www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade) The same is true of the fair trade chocolate I mentioned above.

A couple other situations they documented were children (mostly girls) making gravel and mud bricks in India, working long hours for little pay, exposed to rock dust and forced to carry huge loads on their heads. They showed a situation in Sumatra where young boys are working in fishing, stuck for three months at a time on these piers in the middle of the ocean with Dickens-esque foremen. Many fall off the piers and drown.

Another place they focused their cameras was the United States. Yes, right here! Migrant farm workers in the U.S. are often whole families, with young children (a 9 year old girl was featured) working long days even when they’re sick and getting exposed to lots of pesticides. Buying organic is one way to mitigate the effects.

It would be great to see the whole documentary sometime. Ted Koppel interviewed the two men who faced a lot of opposition (e.g., authorities at the filming sites wanting to beat them up) to make the documentary. Pretty brave work. Koppel had a powerful closing argument himself…

“It wouldn’t require a military invasion or even intervention in the internal affairs of another country. Just a little research. Anything produced by child labor, slave labor or a combination of the two is unfit for the American market. (And, incidentally, that means cleaning up our own mess at home first. Those migrant children working on our ranches and farms belong in school.)

“I understand the equation. All of us consumers love a bargain. Some cheap labor, though, is just too expensive to tolerate.”

Sounds like a social justice issue to me.